Chapter XVII - Education and Literary

There is singularly little mention of writing or education in
ancient times, and it seems likely that written records were at
first confined to castings or engravings upon metal, and carvings
upon stone. In the days when the written character was cumbrous,
there would be no great encouragement to use it for daily
household purposes. It is a striking fact, not only that writings
upon soft clay, afterwards baked, were not only non-existent in
China, but have never once been mentioned or conceived of as being
a possibility. This fact effectually disposes of the allegation
that Persian and Babylonian literary civilization made its way to
China, for it is unreasonable to suppose that an invention so well
suited to the clayey soil (of loess mud with cementing properties)
in which the Chinese princes dwelt could have been ignored by them,
if ever the slightest inkling of it had been obtained.

In 770 B.C., when the Emperor, having moved his capital to the
east, ceded his ancestral lands in the west to Ts’in on condition
that Ts’in should recover them permanently from the Tartars, the
document of cession was engraved upon a metal vase. Fifteen
hundred years before this, the Nine Tripods of the founder of the
Hia dynasty, representing tributes of metal brought to the Emperor
by outlying tribes, were inscribed with records of the various
productions of China: these tripods were ever afterwards regarded
as an attribute of imperial authority; and even Ts’u, when it
began to presume upon the Chou Emperor’s weakness, put in a claim
(probably based upon his ancestors’ own ancient Chinese descent,
as explained in Chapter IV.) to possess them.

In distributing the fiefs amongst relatives and friends, the first
Chou emperors “composed orders” conferring rights upon their new
vassals; but it is not stated what written form these orders took.
Written prayers for the recovery of the first Emperor’s health are
mentioned, but here again we are ignorant of the material on which
the prayers were written by the precentor. Four hundred years
later, in 65, when Ts’in had assisted to the throne his neighbour
the Marquess of Tsin, the latter gave a promise in writing to
Ts’in that he would cede to her all the territory lying to the
west of the Yellow River. The next ruler of Tsin, the celebrated
wanderer who afterwards became the second Protector, is distinctly
stated to have had an adviser who taught him to read; it is added
that the same marquess also consulted this adviser about a
suitable teacher for his son and heir. About the same time one of
the Marquess’s friends, objecting to take office, took to flight:
his friends, as a protest, hung up “a writing” at the palace gate.
In 584 a Ts’u refugee in Tsin sends a writing to the leading
general of Ts’u, threatening to be a thorn in his side. It is
presumed that in all these cases the writing was on wood. The text
of a declaration of war against Ts’u by Ts’in in 313 B.C., at a
time when these two powers had ceased to be allies, and were
competing for empire, refers to an agreement made three centuries
earlier between the King of Ts’u and the Earl of Ts’in; this
declaration was carved upon several stone tablets; but it does not
appear upon what material the older agreement was carved. In 538,
at a durbar held by Ts’u, Hiang Suh, the learned man of Sung, who
has already been mentioned in Chapter XV. as the inventor of Peace
Conferences in 546, and as one of the Confucian group of friends,
remarked: “What I know of the diplomatic forms to be observed is
only obtained from books.” A few years later, when the population
of one of the small orthodox Chinese states was moved for
political convenience by Ts’u away to another district, they were
allowed to take with them “their maps, cadastral survey, and
census records.”

There is an interesting statement in the Kwoh Yue, an
ancillary history of these times, but touching more upon personal
matters, usually considered to have been written by the same man
that first expanded Confucius’ annals, to the effect that in 489
B.C. (when Confucius was wandering about on his travels, a
disappointed and disgusted man) the King of Wu inflicted a
crushing defeat upon Ts’i at a spot not far from the Lu frontier,
and that he captured “the national books, 800 leather chariots,
and 3000 cuirasses and shields.” If this translation be perfectly
accurate, it is interesting as showing that Ts’i did possess
Kwoh-shu, or “a State library,” or archives. But unfortunately
two other histories mention the capture of a Ts’i general named Kwoh
Hia, alias Kwoh Hwei-tsz, so that there seems to be a doubt
whether, in transcribing ancient texts, one character (shu) may
not have been substituted for the other (hia). Two years later
the barbarian king in question entered Lu, and made a treaty with that
state upon equal terms.

Shortly after this date, the Chinese adviser who brought about the
conquest of Wu by the equally barbarous Yiieh, had occasion to
send a “closed letter” to a man living in Ts’u. When we come to
later times, subsequent to the death of Confucius, we find written
communications more commonly spoken of. Thus, in 313, Ts’i,
enraged at the supposed faithlessness of Ts’u, “broke in two the
Ts’u tally” and attached herself to Ts’in instead. This can only
refer to a wooden “indenture” of which each party preserved a
copy, each fitting ’in, “dog’s teeth like,” as the Chinese still
say, closely to the other. A few years later we find letters from
Ts’i to Ts’u, holding forth the tempting project of a joint attack
upon Ts’in; and also a letter from Ts’in to Ts’u, alluding to the
escape of a hostage and the cause of a war. In the year 227, when
Ts’in was rapidly conquering the whole empire, the northernmost
state of Yen (Peking plain), dreading annexation, conceived the
plan of assassinating the King of Ts’in; and, in order to give the
assassin a plausible ground for gaining admittance to the tyrant’s
presence, sent a map of Yen, so that the roads available for
troops might be explained to the ambitious conqueror, who would
fall into the trap. He barely escaped.

All these matters put together point to the clear conclusion that
such states as Ts’in, Tsin, Ts’i, Yen, and Ts’u (none of which
belonged, so far as the bulk of their population was concerned, to
the purely Chinese group concentrated in the limited area
described in the first Chapter) were able to communicate by letter
freely with each other: a fortiori, therefore, must the
orthodox states, whose civilization they had all borrowed or
shared, have been able to communicate with them, and with each
other. Besides, there is the question of the innumerable treaties
made at the durbars, and evidently equally legible by all the
dozen or so of representatives present; and the written prayers,
already instanced, which were probably offered to the gods at most
sacrifices. A special Chapter will be devoted to treaties.

In the year 523 the following passage occurs, or rather it occurs
in one of the expanded Confucian histories having retrospective
reference to matters of 523 B.C:–"It is the father’s fault if, at
the binding up of the hair (eight years of age), boys do not go to
the teacher, though it may be the mother’s fault if, before that
age, they do not escape the dangers of fire and water: it is their
own fault if, having gone to the teacher, they make no progress:
it is their friends’ fault if they make progress but get no repute
for it: it is the executive’s fault if they obtain repute but no
recommendation to office: it is the prince’s fault if they are
recommended for office but not appointed.” Here we have in effect
the nucleus at least of the examination system as it was until a
year or two ago, together with an inferential statement that
education was only meant for the governing classes.

It is rather remarkable that the invention of the “greater seal"
character in 827 B.C. practically coincides with the first signs
of imperial decadence; this is only another piece of evidence in
favour of the proposition that enlightenment and patriarchal rule
could not exist comfortably together. When Ts’in conquered the
whole of modern China 600 years later, unified weights and
measures, the breadth of axles, and written script, and remedied
other irregularities that had hitherto prevailed in the rival
states, it is evident that the need of a more intelligible script
was then found quite as urgent as the need of roads suitable for
all carts, and of measures by which those carts could bring
definite quantities of metal and grain tribute to the capital.
Accordingly the First August Emperor’s prime minister did at once
set to work to invent the “lesser seal” character, in which (so
late as A.D. 200) the first Chinese dictionary was written; this
“lesser seal” is still fairly readable after a little practice,
but for daily use it has long been and is impracticable and
obsolete. If we reflect how difficult it is for us to decipher the
old engrossed charters and written letters of the English kings,
we may all the more easily imagine how even a slight change in the
form of “letters,” or strokes, will make easy reading of Chinese
impossible. It is a mistake to suppose that the Chinese have to
“spell their way” laboriously through the written character so
familiar to them: it is just as easy to “skim over” a Chinese
newspaper in a few minutes as it is to “take in” the leading
features of the Times in the same limited time; and volumes
of Chinese history or literature in general can be “gutted” quite
easily, owing to the facility with which the so-called pictographs,
once familiar, lend themselves to “skipping.”

The Bamboo Books, dug up in A.D. 281, the copies of the classics
concealed in the walls of Confucius’ house, the copy of Lao-tsz’s
philosophical work recorded to have been in the possession of a
Chinese empress in 150 B.C.–all these were written in the
“greater seal,” and the painstaking industry of Chinese
specialists was already necessary when the Christian era began, in
order to reduce the ancient characters to more modern forms. Since
then the written character has been much clarified and simplified,
and it is just as easy to express sentiments in written Chinese as
in any other language; but, of course, when totally new ideas are
introduced, totally new characters must be invented; and
inventions, both of individual characters and of expressions, are
going on now.